“Every Single Night”

Only Fiona Apple could deliver something like the psychologically complex self-analysis on "Every Single Night" and sound elated. Like the lead-off title-track from 2005's Extraordinary Machine, "Night" is all poetry, presented over instrumentation that's been pared to a minimum. "Every single night's a fight with my brain," she declares, and clarifies, "Every single fight's all right." She almost revels in it.

The song ebbs and flows from trembling, whispered musings to loud, triumphant declarations of self-awareness, and the most chilling bits come when Apple makes the quiet parts feel tense and visceral. With a typically exceptional execution of poetic device, she takes a muted affair and colors it, as she fluidly narrates how butterflies (the personification of "ideas") trickle down the spine and swarm the belly before swelling to a blaze. Even as Apple describes the pain of her all-consuming thoughts, it sounds like desire, and her ear for detail helps conjure a sense of physicality. Point in case: "My heart's made of parts of all that surrounds me," and later, "What I am is what I am cause I does what I does."

Apple has a genius for articulating the power that comes with solitude and self-reliance, and here she expands what that can mean. "I just want to feel everything," she sings, illustrating the point by stretching her voice across the full spectrum of her register. Fifteen years later, she still has an uncanny knack for getting under your skin and inspiring you to go with yourself.